Problems with the Cloud

Microsoft used to run an ad where a woman at home had a problem to solve. She then says, "To the cloud," like it is a miracle solution that will solve all problems. I remember thinking how stupid the response seemed to me. She just needed to know how to use some of the software she probably already had on her computer. Since the ad first appeared, we have seen a number of software and services transition to Internet servers and I some of it doesn't make sense.

Last night I turned on the nightly news and saw a story about how 911 services went down around the state. The disruption caused the FCC to get involved as emergency calls are rather important. It turns out that Microsoft had an issue with their cloud authentication for several hours making it so people couldn't log into e-mail, Azure, Sharepoint, One-Drive, and a number of other services. I have to admit that I am a bit concerned when I see that Microsoft's cloud is running such important things as 911 services. I have never trusted Microsoft products for critical systems as I have had too many crashes and lost a significant amount of work throughout the years. That is one of the reasons I am writing this on a Mac and have my blog hosted by Google.

The Microsoft crash effected two of my tasks yesterday as Sony uses a number of Microsoft cloud products such as Sharepoint and Exchange (e-mail). Fortunately I had other things I could do and so I just moved onto those tasks until this morning. Now everything seems to be running smoothly.

So what went wrong? I did a quick Internet search this morning as I assumed there would be plenty of information about the outage. I was not wrong as a number of news sources felt the outage worth reporting. Ultimately they all use Microsoft as the source for the problem. Some speculated that this might be caused by some sort of Distributed Denial of Surface (DDoS) attack. Microsoft came and said that it wasn't. Their explanation revealed a "code issue" that kept their servers from processing login information appropriately. Does that concern anyone as much as it does me?

There are a number of services that benefit from moving from people's local computers up into the Internet cloud. Then there are some others that are best left to local hardware. Hopefully we are not all blinded by the promises of the cloud to be stupid about it.